May 24, 2007

You’ll see that my blog subtitle is photography for the people. Now why choose something so well boring. Because nowadays photography is for the rich guys. I was looking yesterday at two photoblogs. One is some kid I met while working for a magazine and he’s a total dick head and the other I have no idea who he is but I don’t like him either. What do they have in common? Decent photos. Mind you I didn’t say amazing photos or even good photos since one simply edits his photos in picasa (making them look like crap enlarged) and the other one has only little knowledge regarding editing some subjects. Sure they both make okay images. But what’s the catch? Money. They’ve got expensive cameras but most of all, they’ve got the ability to travel… One goes to the States more often than I go to school (ok, that one’s easy to beat) and the other one has a dirt motorbike and just travels the country whenever he wants. They have time to post-process and they can take photos and be encouraged for it. On the other hand there’s say me, who have an unpaid job as a photographer and have to hide it from my folks because they think photography sucks. I know you might believe this is bitching from just another kid who does nothing all day long and you may be right but look at the situation like this: if you’re broke and have nowhere to go all you can do is take photos of what you have close to you. And that gets boring after a while.

Money makes the world go ’round. Thing is that kid has money for special glass. Say fisheye. And tele. And there’s no doubt in my mind that with a little bit of decent knowledge you can get more from a 20D than from an entry-level. Also, editing is hell on my 1.8ghz athlon. So basically if I had to make a list of what I need it would be: wide lens, teleconverter, polarizers and UV filters, flash, backdrops, lightbox, studio lights, hotshoe pc socket, a core2duo computer with at least 2gb of ram, LCD screen, memory cards, and some way to get around the city. So it would pretty much need about 5000$ minimum. And right now all I have is 25cents…

October 12, 2006

A DSLR. These very simple letters tell it all. What’s a DSLR? Power. Pure and simple power. People look at you on the street, they feel its aura. They see that massive lens and they feel their feet tremble. The most common and usually stupidest question you get while wearing it is “Is that a PROFESSIONAL camera?”. Which is dumb, they should ask, are you a professional, but no. The camera itself radiates an image of you that you could never capture in words. Maybe in pictures.

That’s not the case of the Leica though. The Leica is a connaisseur camera, it blends in, it looks like a cheap old rangefinder, only few see it as the ultra-expensive camera it is. I don’t say more than ultra-expensive because I find that the Leica is amazing mostly due to its prestige… Sure it may be a rugged body, but so is the Olympus E-1. Sure, it’s small to carry and hide, but so is the Sony T7. The people who want Leica only want the name that’s on it. Leica used to make normal glass cookery and it was called Jena. But now its prestige sells a camera that’s probably not worth more than a semi-pro DSLR at the price of a Mark I or higher.

But back to the DSLR. Everyone wants one. Unlike the Leica, everyone knows a DSLR is a flashy pro camera. That’s why most people just go ahead and buy Canon. Basic point and shoot mechanism built into a DSLR. Research has shown that on a sunny f/16 day the Canon 20D is just as effective as a Canon Powershot A300something. But people don’t want the features, they want the recognition. They think a DSLR is suddenly gonna make their sunday snaps look like magnum work. And Canon imo struggles to do just that. But then you get into other companies. Like Olympus for example. They make a DSLR which can take good photos, has amazing colour rendition and good quality, *but* which in order to be used to its fullest needs the skill of the photographer 200%. Because that’s what people look to you for when they see a DSLR around your neck. An amazing man behind a brilliant machine to create art out of drystone…

And that’s where the concept fails. So many kids these days all with powerful expensive cameras around their necks and nothing in their heads just setting the camera to full contrast full saturation and shooting crap all day long that the DSLR, once a tool to recognise someone by, has become but a ghost of its past… A new breed of photography has arisen, one i like to call “Statistical Photography”… It’s every snapshooter’s dream, it’s the “if 1000 monkeys clicked at 1000DSLRs in 2 weeks you would get the best photographs ever”, it’s the decay of all that is holy in photography.

Some call it accesibility. And it is, i mean i find it normal to be able to buy a cool camera and take nice vacation photos but it’s not about that. And it’s not about taking photos of rocks and stuff like that. It’s about a way of pointing and then thinking before shooting… The middle of the equation is always blurred… No one thinks anymore. They’re digital, I can always delete them… The photographer has lost the attachment to his photos. All is lost.

September 16, 2006

You know I just realised most blog posts sound like this:

“OMFG dude today was so cool. like this morning after i went to mike’s place we met shirley and we totally hung out at radisco’s. and you know how that is. man i wish i had bill gates’ money… that’d be rad! oh and i feel so alone now like you know we’re travellers in this boat man”

…and so on. Which is total bullshit if you ask me. Not only do we not know (or fuckin care) who mike and shirley are but we have no idea what radisco’s is. Or what in God’s name one can do there… and then starts the bitching, i chose to exemplify money here, but you can choose your pick from over 100 different cliches from “why can’t i be that thin?” to “dude why doesn’t that chick wanna do me?”. The answer is easy, because you’re fuckin retards writing blogs all day. Fuckin get outta here, go do something interesting. And of course not bullshit blog is worth even mentioning unless it contains a daily dose of shitcan philosophy. Be it life, the universe or god himself, they always find new ways to say absolutely fuckin nothing…

So I decided to start my own blog with zero tolerance to that shit. Besides the fact that i do want to examine other blogs and find all that crap, i’d like to give an example of how a blog should sound:

Yahoo is moronic; today i was searching for a way to sell my stuff on the street (google is unreachable until my isp’s isp figures a way out to it, i recommend sticking a lan wire up their ass and see if they reach google that way) and what it returned was “gay laws, drugs being sold on the street, and children killing you on the street with…”. Like how fucked up is that…? what is this, psycho killing for dummies?

Now that’s my kind of a reader’s digest. Oh, and smileys. Jesus you people use a lot of smileys, ranging from simple x and o signs to complex representations of plants and animals. (like 3:-0 for a cow and @>-‘- for a rose). With chat clients and websites all accepting photos and all that would’t it be easier to send a picture of a cow instead. Or fucking say “you’re a cow michelle” not a wimpy “michelle you’re a 3:-0”. What the fuck is it? Retarded clown day?…

With that i end my daily broadcast and insert a little plug for all the ladies out there who have pimped out myspace or hi5 accounts and have only understood from my post the words fuck shit and maybe the photo (which apparently i can’t post right now). Until next time, stay not so fucked up will you.

August 12, 2006

// thus it begins, the new world. you pop a pill and before you know it *boom* it’s there. never seen it like this before. a plethora of colours, sensations and wow… a trip if you want but if i say it like that you won’t understand… you’ll just think i’m high on some plant and talking tongues. but i mean light man. i mean the one thing we could not imagine our lives without. do you feel like the screen in front of you would be the same without the tiny little bodies of spectral energy we perceive as this luminance. it falls on bodies of mass and gives them shape texture and a meaning. it’s my job to present that to you. it’s my job to trap those little buggers into an array of bits, shoot them down a tube of light and retransmit them into your fovea for your enjoyment… [[link]] //